The Labourers Act, passed by the British Parliament for the benefit of the Irish labourers, who get but scant recognition of their wants and wishes from the tenant farmers, is not producing the good results expected from it, mainly because it is perverted to all sorts of jobbery. Only last week Colonel Spaight had to hand in to the Local Government Board a report on certain schemes of expenditure under this Act, prepared by the Board of Guardians of Tralee. These schemes contemplated the erection of 196 cottages in 135 electoral divisions of the Union. This meant, of course, so much money of the ratepayers to be turned over to local contractors. Colonel Spaight on inspection found that of the 196 proposed cottages, the erection of 61 had been forbidden by the sanitary authorities, the notices for the erection of 23 had been wrongly served, 20 were proposed to be erected on sites not adjoining a public road, and no necessity had been shown for erecting 40 of the others. He accordingly recommended that only 32 be allowed to be erected! For a small town like Tralee this proposition to put up 196 buildings at the public expense where only 32 were needed is not bad. It has the right old Tammany Ring smack, and would have commanded, I am sure, the patronising approval of the late Mr. Tweed. I mentioned it to-night at the County Club, when a gentleman said that this morning at Macroom a serious "row" had occurred between the local Board of Guardians there and a great crowd of labourers. The labourers thronged the Board-room, demanding the half-acre plots of land which had been promised them. The Guardians put them off, promising to attend to them when the regular business of the meeting was over. So the poor fellows were kept waiting for three mortal hours, at the end of which time they espied the elected Nationalist members of the Board subtly filing out of the place. This angered them. They stopped the fugitives, blockaded the Board-room, and forced the Guardians to appoint a committee to act upon their demands. It is certainly a curious fact that, so far, in Ireland I have seen no decent cottages for labourers, excepting those put up at their own expense on their own property by landlords. I dined to-night at the County Club with Captain Plunkett, a most energetic, spirited, and well-informed resident magistrate, a brother of the late Lord Louth,--still remembered, I dare say, at the New York Hotel as the only Briton who ever really mastered the mystery of concocting a "cocktail,"--and an uncle of the present peer. We had a very cheery dinner, and a very clever lawyer, Mr. Shannon, gave us an irresistible reproduction of a charge delivered by an Irish judge famous for shooting over the heads of juries, who sent twelve worthy citizens of Galway out of their minds by bidding them remember, in a case of larceny, that they could not find the prisoner guilty unless they were quite sure "as to the _animus furandi_ and the _asportavit_."